Google-backed agritech startup Cropin Technology, on April 16 launched ‘akṣara,’ a purpose-built open-source Micro Language Model (MLM) for climate smart agriculture.
This comes at a time when the generative AI wave is gaining momentum with businesses across the globe building newer models tailored to their specific industries.
In a statement, the company said that the MLM is designed to address the challenges faced by underserved farming communities in the Global South. Cropin added that the model will work to remove barriers to knowledge and help anyone in the agricultural ecosystem build frugal and scalable AI solutions for the sector.
“In an era where Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping jobs, businesses, and customer interactions, the spotlight is now on industry-specific models trained on niche and comprehensive domain data as the 'next big thing.' These models can potentially transform agriculture, paving the way for a new era of tech-driven farming in a sector that has traditionally seen limited technological advancement,” said Krishna Kumar, founder and CEO, Cropin, in the statement.
Developed by Cropin and hosted on Hugging Face, the company said that akṣara is a frugal and scalable MLM built and fine-tuned on top of the Mistral-7B-v0.2 model. Hugging Face is a French-American company that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning, while Mistral.ai is a French company founded in April 2023 by previous employees of Meta Platforms and Google DeepMind, selling artificial intelligence products.
Cropin said its AI team used Google's People + AI Guidebook and discussions with Google's Responsible AI team to help guide the model's design process.
“The model ensures that the responses are factually relevant and brief while minimising the compute and storage resource requirement. It was fine-tuned with more than 5,000 high-quality question-response pairs specific to agriculture and more than 160k tokens in the context. These numbers are expected to increase as we add more crops, geographic locations and use cases,” Cropin added in its statement.
According to Cropin, recognising the environmental impact of running LLMs, it has meticulously compressed ‘akṣara’ into 4-bit from 16-bit.
As per Cropin, the first version of akṣara will cover nine crops - paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and millets for five countries in the Indian subcontinent.
Kumar added, “Domain-specific AI models for agriculture are expected to attract significant investments, offering a practical and economically viable approach to food systems transformation. Akṣara reinstates our commitment to leading the tech-driven agricultural movement in the years ahead, significantly impacting small-scale farmers' lives.”
The company also said that it is also looking to collaborate with industry players and academia to accelerate its vision of a more digitally empowered, data and AI-driven agriculture landscape worldwide.
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